DENAFRIPS DAC ---- Owner Impressions, Feedback, General Discussion, Questions and more....

Well the only time I experienced a loud distortion and hiss was with the 1st Amanero board, possibly with the end of 2018 firmware for the new board (1st iteration) which was very stable with the update from Nov 2019, that update was revealing. MCU and FPGA update. If your DAC is from Nov 2019 or newer it should have such firmware. Which by the way brings the SQ to an entire new level.

FWIW and IMO using Roon by itself I prefer the Terminator with PCM max native rate and not upsampling in Roon. Terminator in OS mode (not NOS)
If you use HQPe (which I prefer to Roon alone) then PCM max upsampling 1536 with 19 bits and Termy in NOS mode.
Again this is just my preferenceThis is a wonderful DAC, I would love to hear comments for the DAC and the DDC as well

Another member on AS provided these Roon settings and I gotta say, I'm really liking them on my Terminator (my ultraRendu is set to native DSD), I am streaming Tidal and local files:

Roon Instructions:

 

In Roon, tap the speaker icon in the bottom right corner, tap "DSP".  tap "Headroom Management", and set the value to -5 dB, this lowers the level before oversampling to avoid clipping during the oversampling process.  In the same field, set "Show Clipping Indicator" to "on".  This will tell you if you have an clipping during playback (if you do, you can lower the headroom management a couple more dB, but usually -5 dB is enough).  Tap, "Sample Rate Conversion", and set sample rate conversion to "DSD".  Set "DSD Sample Rate" to 256,  Set "Sample Rate Conversion Filter" to "Precise, Linear Phase" (I prefer this setting, but you can try others of course).  Set "Sigma Delta Modulator" to "7th order CLANS", leave "SDM Gain Adjustment" at "0", set "Parallelize Sigma-Delta Modulator" to "Yes", set "Enable Native DSD Processing" to "Yes".  The DSD to PCM settings are irrelevant.

Before you exit, double check on the left that "Headroom Management", and "Sample Rate Conversion" are enabled.

Just thought I would share with this group.

P.S.  Looking forward to my Gaia- should ship within the next week or two!

I'm approaching 1000 hours on my Terminator and it's really sounding great. I'm using Roon ROCK on a fanless NUC through an EtherRegen to a Bryston BDP-2 (upgraded audio card) connected to the Terminator through AES3. 

I've found using Roon sample rate conversion to Max PCM Rate (power of 2) with the Precise, Minimum Phase filter, and the Termy set to OS (NOS off) gives me the best sound. 

I haven't experienced any hissing or ringing, but did have an occasional skip or hiccup (maybe once or twice a day). This was after I modified my NUC to use an internal SSD drive instead of a USB drive, but before I added the EtherRegen. I haven't noticed any hiccups on the past few weeks, so I'm not sure if it was related to the changes I made, or just a coincidence.

I'm intrigued by the Gaia, but would probably only consider this if I could replace my Bryston and switch to using USB from the NUC to the Gaia and then I2S to the DAC. I'm be interested to hear how this works for people. 

So I'm a Roon user, and while I get the headroom settings, why on earth would you buy an expensive R2R dac if you are going to feed it DSD??

That makes no sense to me.